Starting with little money?

[LifeofEgypt]

Often people bail on a good home business idea because of lack of funding. What good ideas dooes anyone have for things like low cost advertising? Is it good to get a small loan or raise the money through investors?

[UpAndAtEm]

Hi.

You've brought up a very good point! I can certainly relate to what you're saying about lack of funds. In fact, I think just about every mom on this forum can!

There are so many great ways to advertise for free, and sometimes you can even get people to pay you to advertise to them! That's right!

One way to get free advertising is to write press releases about what you do. A good press release isn't just written for the press, it's written for your potential customers and clients. Since the explosion of the internet press releases are read by everyone, not just the press. There are several great websites that can teach you how to write a press release. You can find them by doing a google search. You can also hire someone to write the release for you, though this defeats the purpose of "free" advertising when you're on a tight budget.

Another way you can get the word out about your business for free is to offer to talk to local groups that might have an interest in what you do. Sometimes these groups will pay you to come and speak to them. You won't want your entire talk to sound like an advertisement, however. People will come to listen to you to learn something, so you'll want to be sure that what you have to offer them is beneficial whether or not they buy your product or sign up for your program or whatever. But, if you are paid to speak, it's as good as getting paid to advertise if you do it properly.

Business cards are a great way to let people know about your business and they are very affordable. You can even print them from your computer, depending on the nature of your business. You should have all of your contact information on your cards, as well as slogan that tells what your business does. You can print specials or information about a particular product on the back side of the card to entice customers to contact you or remember something about your company.

If your business is a local one, you can post flyers on bulletin boards in your community. This works well for daycares and caregivers.

Joining a local group, such as Toastmasters, can help too. You'll meet other business people who might have a need for your services or products.

So those are some ways you can get the word out about your business at little or no cost. But, what if you're just starting out and you have no money at all to get going? That was my situation when I started my publishing company. At first, I was going to be an author, but I had no money to produce my book. I wrote a smaller book, a booklet, which was cheaper to produce, but I still had no money even for that. However, I had plenty of experience coming up with quick cash as a stay at home mom. I had several tricks up my sleeve that could produce as much as a couple hundred dollars in just a couple of days. I used all those tricks to not only produce my booklet, but to produce a second one and then raise my publishing company from nothing to what it is today, and I never took out a loan or asked investors for a penny.

I wrote all the ways in which I earned that money into one of my booklets, "60 Ways To Make Fast Cash." You might find it helpful for starting your business, especially if you don't want to go into debt to do it. The ideas here aren't necessarily written with the entrepreneur in mind, though they will work just fine for that. I wrote the booklet to help other moms who were struggling from paycheck to paychek, so they could find ways to get a little extra cash to help them out. But, what you do with money is up to you, so it doesn't matter whether you use it to pay a bill, buy some groceries, or start a business bank account, the ideas still work.

I hope I've been helpful here. If you're interested in my booklet, you'll find it available as a download from my website. The direct link is http://www.upandatempublication.com/products.php?scid=5

[rfresh]

There are a lot of web sites where you can advertise your product or service for free!! You just have to google around and find them but they are there and a lot of them!

[Audrey]

Ralph,

Do you advertise on the sites that offer free advertising? I do...but I also look for other ways to advertise that are free. An example...on my own site, I offer anyone who submits a recipe a backlink to their own site. I seek out these type of offers that I can participate in.

[rfresh]

Yes I do but not as many as I used to. I'm using one of my own tools called Traffic Facts and this is a website stats tools. It reports to me many things but one of the reports I get (emailed to me daily) is what URL's are my visitors coming from.

This kind of information allows me to see which free websites are working and which ones are not. Time must be managed carefully so those sites which are not delivering visitors I don't go back to re-post/renew my ads.

I also use this report to tell me about my paid-for advertising. If I'm not getting hits from my paid advertising Dollars then I stop advertising with them and go somewhere else.

[Audrey]

I should probably track better where my visitors come from. My site is hosted with godaddy. I just use their free stats info.